Year in Review: Top Articles of 2012 (Plus a Free Ebook) | LJ Insider

Everyone does a year-end list, and I don’t like being left out. But I also don’t like lists that are short on context, or worse, short on content. So I channeled my inner Nate Silver and sliced the LJ universe of data in a couple of ways that I hope are more illuminating than just a raw, short list of articles that got a lot of attention in 2012. (For those just interested in the free ebook, see embedded at the bottom an exportable version of the Top 20 Opinion Posts of 2012.)

A couple of notes to get started:

Unless otherwise indicated, these links include only editorial posts penned in 2012 (meaning that things like LJ‘s Best Books of 2011, e.g., published very late in 2011 and maintaining a strong presence throughout the next year, did not qualify, nor did many other lasting pieces from 2011 and previous years).

Likewise, only single articles are being counted. What is not counted: section home pages, landing and event pages (Like materials from our virtual ebook summit), categories, tags, and other non-article things. Just the posts, ma’am.

Now, as I was pulling all these together, I realized that a more useful (and potentially accurate) metric would be to weight the pageviews on a story according to the number of days since the article was published. As noted above, listings like these tend to favor strong posts published in the first half of the year over posts potentially as important, just published toward the end of the year. For now, however, that kind of calculation is beyond the scope of this exercise.

Beyond the Top 10, I think it’s also revealing to see where the next few stories go for each of the different sections of the LJ universe (for more on what I mean by “LJ universe,” see the post I wrote just over a year ago about giving some of the subsections more prominence).

Top LJ News & Features Posts

First up is the News & Features section, which unsurprisingly tends toward current events and our annual awards and highlights.

Top LJ Reviews Posts

On the LJ Reviews side, I’m listing 10, since these aren’t covered above, and because they highlight some of the fascinating subject areas that were big in 2012 (likely to be just as big in 2013 as well):

Top 10 LJ infoDOCKET Posts

The latest addition to the LJ family is infoDOCKET, edited by librarian and newshound Gary Price. I like to think of this as something along the lines of a libraryland “media monitoring service,” or my preferred term, “library media intelligence.” Essentially, Gary pores over thousands of headlines so you don’t have to, and features the essential stories on infodocket.com and @infodocket on Twitter, as well as in our various (free!) enewsletters and syndicated on other LJ sites.

The infoDOCKET site started under the LJ banner in April, but it existed independently before then at the same URL, and the 10 items below cover the popular stories over the entirety of 2012.

Top Academic Posts

Based largely on the readership of our Academic Newswire enewsletter, here are the top posts specifically tagged for our academic library readership (though obviously nearly everything above has a wider professional impact as well that’s relevant to research, college, and community college libraries, among others).

Top Evergreen Posts

None of the five articles below were written in 2012. In fact, there’s nothing more recent than 2010 on this list. But in compiling the rest of these lists I ran across a number of articles that remain steadily popular, in some cases growing in popularity years after their original publication date. This is largely the Google Traffic Machine at work, especially in the case of the articles of interest to readers seeking out information about how to enter the profession. Though these articles go way back, I’m including them as a look at what abides long-term relative to seemingly short half-life of prevailing concerns.

Top Opinion Posts

Saving the longest list for last: There were dozens of thoughtful 2012 opinion pieces illustrating the conversations that buzzed, so I’m going all-out and including the top 20 posts here (inclusive of posts appearing in the lists above). As an added bonus, I’ve added these all to Readlist, which experimentally allows you to export an ebook (.epub, Kindle, etc.) and read them in one sitting. Click “export” in the left-hand sidebar of the Readlist widget below, and choose the format that suits your needs.